Hofstra University Honors College's Blog

Posts tagged ‘campus’

Imagine if you will, nine college students sat in a room together. They all look very different from each other. They’re all studying different things for different reasons. They all come from different backgrounds and all have different faiths. Then, these nine students are asked to come up with a list of commandments. A list of things that they all agreed were universally true of how people ought to live. This is exactly the task posed at the “Gay and Spiritual” meeting last night. The members of the group were gay, straight, bi, Catholic, Wiccan, agnostic, and beyond. There were no two people who I could say were the same. I’d even hesitate to say that any two people were similar. As one can imagine, writing commandments wasn’t as easy a task as it sounds.

Everyone had different ideas about right and wrong and how vague or specific the commandments should be. There was debate over whether or not we had the right to tell anyone how to live on a personal level or if we could only say how people should interact with others. Words had to be chosen carefully and concepts chosen had to be something that everyone agreed on. The commandments weren’t chosen by majority, they were chosen by consensus.

I would not have been surprised if the group only came up with one or two things that we all agreed on. In the end, we came up with a list of six commandments that all nine of us agreed are a good set of general rules for life. (more…)

After I took C&E last year, I was surprised how many allusions from C&E books we read were in popular culture. For example, I realized that Beatrice from A Series of Unfortunate Events is an allusion to Dante’s Beatrice in his Divine Comedy. I also began watching Lost last year and I was astounded by how many references there were to things that I had just learned in C&E. Here’s a list of some of the allusions that I picked up on.

-John Locke: This is the most obvious allusion. The character of John Locke is based off of the philosopher by the same name. Although we didn’t read anything he wrote in C&E, he often came up in discussions, especially his Tabula Rasa theory. One of Lost’s episodes is titled Tabula Rasa and the theme of the episode revolves around his blank slate theory. (more…)

Recently I found out there’s been a push to get a chapel on Campus. I’m active in the Catholic community at Hofstra so I was able to write about the movement (for lack of a better word) for my Journalism 11 class. I revised the story and submitted it to the Chronicle, if anyone’s interested in reading it they can find it here.

But I want to know what Hofstra thinks. Should there be a chapel on campus? Currently we have Catholic Mass in the Greenhouse, a place that’s hard to find because it’s past the Rathskeller in the basement of the Student Center. And because the Greenhouse is used by other organizations – most notably the SGA on Tuesdays – the Catholic community uses an altar that can be folded up and tucked in a corner.

What the set up looks like.

There's built in storage on the other side of the Altar.

After Mass, everything is put away. The Altar box is tucked into the corner while the Table is put into a closet.

I think we should get a chapel on campus, but it should be a place of communal worship and prayer. Anyone could use it, regardless of their faith, and the three major religions on campus (four if you differentiate between InterVarsity Fellowship and the Catholic Campus Parish) would have equal use of the room. There would be design issues that need to be considered. I don’t think the Jewish and Muslim groups would appreciate gathering in a room with stain glass windows and crosses and a crucifix everywhere.